Wizards of Waverly Place  The Lost Son
by Thor2000
Summary: Justin wishes Alex wasn't his sister and gets his wish - getting a new family, a new identity and sisters that make him realize maybe Alex isn't that bad after all...
1. Chapter 1

One minute he was asleep and dreaming he was exploring the sewers and tunnels under Manhattan, and the next, he was jarred awake by the screaming and yelling coming from outside his bedroom.

"Alex, I'm first in the bathroom!" One voice screamed. "Stay out!"

"I don't see your name on it!"

"I knew you'd say that!" The first voice continued. "So I put it there!"

There was a sound of grumbling, feet stomping through the hall and the sound of a cardboard sign being torn down and ripped to shreds. This was the routine practically every morning - the sound of brother against sister fighting for bathroom privileges. Pedestrians out on the street looked up to the residence above Waverly Submarine Sandwich shop and rolled their eyes. The Russo kids were fighting again. The youngest of the three, Max Russo, just groaned in neglected and forgotten dismay, buried his face into his pillow and pulled his blankets over his head, hoping to return to the mystery of the sunken city under New York City. Downstairs, Jerry Russo barely had his breakfast toast in his mouth when he stopped, paused and tilted his head up to the third floor.

"Jerry," His wife looked to him. "Aren't you going to handle that?"

"Me?" He reacted hesitant. "Why is it always me? Why do I got to handle it?"

"Because it's your turn!" Theresa flared her eyes and gestured with the spatula she used to flip the pancakes on the stove. Grousing and grumbling, Jerry just burned and turned disgusted to have to dispel the punishments if but to turn back from the spiral staircase to the bedrooms, grab another piece of toast and then re-continue his journey up to his teenage son and daughter. His feet ascending the stairs, his mood turning even sourer by the moment, he arrived at the bathroom door with the angriest face he could muster. His nineteen-year-old son emerged happy, content and twirling a wand in his fingers.

"What…." He screamed the first word and then lowered his voice for the rest. "…Is going on up here?" He was more annoyed than angry. "Can't I get through one morning without a battle for the bathroom?"

"Oh…" Justin smiled while checking his chin for signs of a beard. "I fixed things. I gave Alex her own bathroom."

"Her own bathroom?" Jerry relaxed and his eyebrows went up intrigued. "Oh, well, that works…" He mulled it over peripherally in his mind. "That should fix things right there. Good work, son…" He patted his son to the shoulder, turned to get some breakfast before his progeny came charging down and then stopped in an alarmed state and swung around agitated and nervous.

"Her own bathroom?" He rushed into the kid's bathroom, looking around hurriedly and frantic, pulling the shower curtain aside, peering under the sink, into the linen closet and even into the water tank of the toilet. Where was she? Where did Justin put his sister? She wasn't in the drawers or the medicine cabinet! The frantic father spun around looking up and around then heard the sound of tapping on glass. He turned to the window and looked down over Waverly Place, nearly pulling down the curtains in the process. Where was she? Where was the tapping coming from? From over his shoulder, he noticed movement and found her inside the reflection of the mirror. She was through the looking glass!

"Alex!" Jerry freaked. It was like looking through a window into a non-existent room. Within the reflection was the mirror version of the kid's bathroom, and with it was the additional image of Alex Russo soundlessly pounding at the other side of the glass, her voice trapped in that temporary mystic realm as she pounded and screamed at her father through the mirror. The sound of her voice was not coming through the mirror. She was shivering and jumping up and down in her nightgown and robe as she froze from the coldness of the alien world to which she was exiled. She was hysterical to get back.

"Alex!" Jerry shook the mirror and gave her an earthquake, looking back as she warned him not to do that by shaking her head and waving her arms. Her eyes flittered from the cold; her lips were quivering and turning blue as Jerry pressed his hands to the mirror. "I'll get you out of there!" Jerry realized his kids were using magic again and rushed out of the bathroom, past the door to Max's room and nearly ran into Justin coming in his bathrobe for his shower. Looking up to his angry father, Justin felt himself grabbed by the collar, dragged forcibly to the bathroom and pushed to the sink where he eyed his sister face to face.

"Get your sister out of that mirror!" Jerry ordered him.

"Can't I get a shower first?" Justin shined with a clever grin. "I mean, listen… it's just so quiet…" Sarcastically tilting his head back, he enjoyed the quiet as Alex pounded and screamed from inside the mirror. Jerry tilted his head back and enjoyed the quiet himself for all of three seconds.

"Yeah, you're right. It is. Well, I guess you…" He recalled his urgency. "What, no! Your sister doesn't have that kind of time! She's freezing in there!" He pointed to her shivering in the mirror. Justin looked back confusingly distracted.

"It's cold in there?"

"Yes!"

"Why?"

"I don't know! It just is!"

Alex's head turned back and forth like a lighthouse to watch her brother and father discussing the incident.

"Okay," Justin pulled his wand. "_Selfish and rude you are, selfish and rude forever you will be_…"

"Spare me the commentary!" Jerry rolled his eyes.

"_Return home at the count of three, one-two-three_…" Justin tapped at his sister's reflection in the glass and the barrier in the glass fell apart, Alex falling through in an immaterial form, falling head first to the floor and landing on her back with her robe and nightgown flailing around her body. If the cold wasn't bad enough, hitting her head and bashing her head was worse enough. Stammering and still exhaling frozen air from her lungs, Alex jumped up swinging at Justin; she would have hit him if the coldness in her bones didn't affect her aim.

"Oh, princess…" Jerry lifted his daughter up shivering and shaking, carrying her to her bedroom and laying her on her bed to pull her blankets up around her to warm up. She had ice in her hair and on the tip of her nose. Her face was white and her fingers were curled up from the cold. Shaking and trembling from the mirror, she reached to her father and hugged him hard.

"Aw…" He hugged her back. "I love you too."

"N-No, I jus-just n-need to w-warm up…" Her teeth were chattering. Jerry just grinned and held her tight, but Alex was already considering her revenge. Her chattered teeth gritted together, her bluish lips pulled back into a snarl and her brown eyes turned to the sound of water going through the pipes of the residence. Just the picture of Justin grinning to himself to have got the shower first fueled every unmoral brain cell in her head.

"J-Justin is not g-getting away with this." Her voice hissed from her lips.

"Alex, please, please…" Jerry held her and pleaded with her. "You've terrorized Justin so many times, and I've let you off the hook. Just let him have it just this once. Please! For once, be the bigger person and back down…"

"Oh, daddy…" Alex grinned through her shivering bones like an innocent little girl. "I'm afraid I just don't work that way." She made a face that was evil incarnate and whipped out her wand from her robe, directing it to the direction of the bathroom with a silent enchantment on her lips. Justin started screaming.

"I said 'please!'" Jerry cringed to see what she was capable of.

"Jerry!" Theresa called from downstairs. "Why is there chocolate syrup coming from the kitchen sink?"

Jerry looked back to Alex, the worst daughter in the world…

"I'm fixing it!" Jerry hollered back and looked to the hall. Standing in his robe tied shut, Justin stood there coated in cold chocolate syrup from his head down over his face and dripping off his body to the floor. Footprints in chocolate down the hall marked his angry path from the bathroom to confront her. He was angry. His brown eyes furrowed with extreme hatred.

"Oh, look…" Alex broke the tense silence. "Justin is out of the shower. I guess it's my turn now." She strolled forward for a nice hot shower that fogged up the bathroom and maybe the downstairs, but Justin impeded her path.

"No!" He shook his finger at her as if she was a bad pet. "No! You are not getting your own way, Alex." He was so angry his voice was coarse and hard as verbal concrete. "This house does not revolve around you. You do not always have get your own way!"

"Of course, I do…" Alex still shivered a bit as she stood him off with a twirl of her wand. "Now, get out of my way, or else…"

"Enough!" Jerry roared. "New rule… no more using spells against your brothers and sisters!"

"That's already a rule!" Jerry reminded his father with a swipe of his hand, a swipe of chocolate from his arm landing on Alex's pink carpeted walls. "And Alex has broken it a million times. Dad, for the love of God, take her wand away!"

"Stay out of this, Justin!"

"Hey, guys!" Justin and Alex's younger brother, Max, stood in the hallway drinking chocolate syrup from a plastic cup. "There's chocolate syrup coming from the shower. Santa Claus finally got my letter!" He grinned satisfied from his unhealthy sugar buzz and returned to fill up his cup. His father and siblings looked to him then returned their attention back to the current incident.

"Okay, enough!" Jerry tried for the last time to be a father who could be friends with his kids. "Alex, get rid of the chocolate and let Justin finish his shower..."

The spoiled rotten daughter in Alex scowled at that edict.

"No….." Max was screaming his distaste for that spell before Alex had even turned the syrup in the pipes back to water.

"Then wait your-own-freaking-turn." Jerry finished his thought with a disgusted grimace. "This house does not revolve around you, it revolves around me! I pay the bills, I do most of the work around here and…" He raised his voice for Theresa to hear. "I cover the majority of the discipline around here!"

He waited for a response from her before continuing.

"Dad…" Justin tapped his father's shoulder with chocolate dripping from his finger. "The wand thing…"

"No more fighting!" Jerry screamed waving his arms and getting a bit dizzy from that outburst. He turned and tramped toward the hall to return to the downstairs for a cold waiting breakfast, leaving behind two angry and hostile teenagers to stew and brood in their forced co-habitation.

"I wish you wasn't my sister!" Justin stared her down.

Jerry turned around after hearing that.

"I wish you wasn't my brother!" Alex reciprocated the feeling.

"Okay you two…" Jerry turned to them. "I want you to…" He noticed both their wands had started glowing. The tip of Justin's wand was glowing brightly at the same time as Alex's wand. Both of them were glowing together in unison growing brighter and brighter. Alex looked at what was happening, looked to her father and back to Justin; the both of them mystified as to what was happening. Justin tried shaking his wand to stop it glowing.

"Justin!" Jerry started reaching toward him. "Drop the wand! Drop your wand!"

"Dad, what's happening?" Justin watched as the light from their wands continued growing brighter and brighter. Alex tossed her wand to him and the light grew even brighter until the three of them were blinded by its brilliance. Jerry reached out to stop whatever spell was happening, but he was too late. Unable to see what was happening, he turned his head from the light and reached to take his son's wand… instead grabbing nothing but air. Justin felt the world vanish from under his feet as the light faded away…


	2. Chapter 2

2

"Uhhh…" Justin Russo took a deep tired breath and blinked his eyes. Pulling his sheets up, he turned to his side, repositioned his arm under his pillow and once more tried to enter his dreams with Hilary Duff feeding him strawberries on a blanket during a picnic in paradise. A rascally thought, the image of her big brown eyes staring back upon him and the ideal of joining in a kiss with her danced through his thoughts. He opened his eyes to his bedroom, glanced on his alarm clock and tried slipping back to the realm of fantasy. A brief image of his bedroom from the fireplace to the wall of books and the sight of fencing swords mounted above the bureau and he sunk deep beneath the satin sheets with his face within a goose down pillow.

This was not his bedroom.

His conscious mind next had him jumping up and scrambling to his feet from the four-poster bed. His feet landed on plush carpet, and he spun round standing in his underwear wondering where he was. Where was he? How'd he get here? His eyes passed from the Victorian furniture to the oak chest at the foot of the bed. The room was paneled in mahogany like the great castles of England. It was decorated not with the trappings of a modern teenager, but with the pursuits of a young British heir. There was the bust of Shakespeare with the antique pewter bric-a-brac on the bureau, the mini-statues of naked scantly-clad goddesses mounted on pedestals in the corners, the fencing swords over his right shoulder on the wall and the large armoire of clothing belonging to whoever rightly lived here. The fireplace was carved from marble tarnished with soot and highlighted atop with the painted austere image of a forgotten young prince in silver armor. The books on the shelves were in a majority of diverse subjects, from history to fiction and the arts, but mostly the works of the ancients such as Ovid, Homer and Hesiod as well as the classics… De Foe, Du Maurier and Champlain. His eyes rounded in surprise, Justin slowly suppressed the shock trying to recall how he got here, and then, gradually recalled the last thing he said to his sister.

"Ohhhh, stupid, stupid…" He slowly sat down on the edge of the bed. "What did I do? What do I do?" he sighed and rubbed his head trying to stave off the last vestiges of sleep. "I've got to get home… where's my wand?" He started looking around the room.

The door to his personal bathroom opened and someone came striding out wearing a heavy blue flannel robe. Her short blonde hair was still a bit wet, and she pulled the belt tight to keep from flashing any parts of her body. Surprised at her sudden appearance, Justin skirted his body to look over his shoulder and slid off the bed on to the floor, looking up at child's eye level at this beautiful girl not at least distressed to see him in this room.

"Yeah, I used your bathroom again…" She stated matter of factly. "What are you going to do about it?"

"What?" Justin looked at her confused, realized he was only wearing underwear and started tugging the blankets off the bed to cover up his bare chest.

"Oh, please…" His new sister chuckled a bit. "I used to change your diaper. It's nothing I've seen before!'

"What?" Justin repeated. She was his older sister?

"William…" The voice of another person wanting to be introduced opened the bedroom door and leaned in to the room. "The power went out in the North Wing and I need you to fix it again." She stood over Justin on the floor. The nineteen-year-old wizard was as confused as ever. Who was William? Was that supposed to be him? In ridding himself of Alex, did he place himself in another family or did he change the past? Was his father downstairs married to another woman, was his mother married to another man? Just what happened to him, and was there a chance this life was better than his last life?

"Why is he on the floor?" Sara Michelle Troy turned to her little sister. Blonde, athletic and dressed in a black and lavender dress with black tights, she looked to her boy-crazy sister. Garbed in her brother's bathrobe, Tricia Gayle Troy turned her head to Sara with nearly the same disdain and ego of another diva-like daughter.

"I finally got him worshipping at my feet." Tricia mumbled and cackled a giggle out loud while adjusting her robe on her way out to her room down the hall.

"I hate her so much." Sara watched her vanish into her room three doors down and turned to the young man she thought was her brother. "William, fuse box…"

"Why can't you fix it?" Justin asked her.

"_Into that musty basement in these clothes_?" Sara gestured to her attire. "Besides, you told me to never touch it."

"Wait!" Justin grabbed a pillow off the bed to hide his lower body, rose back up to his feet and leaned out of the bedroom than venture beyond it. Sara turned round to him, tossing her blonde locks over one shoulder as she turned back to him.

"There's something I got to tell you." Justin tried thinking. "I'm not… I mean… This is wrong. This isn't right. I got to put things back."

"What?" Sara jostled her head in confusion. Her eyes narrowed perplexed, and she gingerly and warmly rubbed Justin on the shoulder. "William, I love you, but… I just can't go back there again."

"What?" Justin shrieked in a girl's voice and watched Sara turn and head down the hall past antique paintings, old gas lamps and decorative furniture filling sections of empty hall in what was obviously a very large and very grand mansion. Exhaling defeatedly, his confusion was making him disoriented. He stepped into the hall with his hand to his head, trying to figure out his surroundings, but in that moment of discourse, a figment with long hair dashed from the library across the hall and into his room trailing a towel in her right hand. In this new family, he didn't have two older sisters, he had three, and they all took turns tormenting him. Her name was Lisa Dawn Troy, and the only way to tell her apart from her twin sister was her long brown hair.

"No, no, no, no, no!" Dropping the pillow, Justin chased after her giggling ahead of him. She loved to tease him and hear him scram for mercy. He was her favorite sibling to abuse. She jumped into his bathroom, and slammed the door ahead of him. Justin crashed into it trying to stop her.

"This isn't fair!" Justin screamed through the door shaking his finger. "I did not ask for any of this! I finally got my own bathroom and you are not welcome in it!"

"I don't care if you come in…." Lisa spoke as Justin checked the door. It wasn't locked.

"But I'm not wearing any clothes now." Lisa added.

Justin nearly choked on his stomach contents and pulled the door shut to protect himself.

"This will not be the end of this!" He posed rising his left hand clenched into a fist in firm declaration. "I will have my own bathroom again!" He sauntered backward, heard the surge of hot water coursing through the pipes of the house to a shower not occupied by himself and dropped to sit on the edge of the bed in defeat.

"I've got to get my life back." He told himself with an echo of desperation.


	3. Chapter 3

3

Chances were if he had changed the past, Justin had skewered his history, and he had ended up with a new mother and a new name. However, there was also the chance he had misplaced himself into an entirely new family, and if that was the case, these girls obviously saw him as whoever he had replaced. When Justin looked into the mirror, he saw his own face looking back. Who was he now? Just who was this William Troy he had become besides a dartboard of abuse and mischief from three older sisters. From what he had seen so far, he was a young heir with money, he lived in a very large house either in New England or Great Britain and was the younger brother of a few sisters. After a cold bath from what seemed to be his own personal bathroom, Justin found a white shirt and dark slacks to wear. The clothes were in his size, and he had an odd instinct of who he was in this world. He had an odd compulsion to brush his shoes clean after pulling them on and tying them, he pulled on the blazer on the hanger hanging by the door and then apprehensively scooted along to make his way downstairs and scout out this new family. Across the way from his bedroom was a small library adorned with a large library of books. Just a casual look around and he was soon off and exploring this estate. Who was his new mother? Who was his new father? Past six bedrooms going down the hallway, he reached the end of the hall to a large galley of portraits. Directly over him was the painting of a steely grinning gentleman in a large chair, his beautiful blonde wife standing at his side, two young girls in the portrait with them in forgotten style of dress. Father resembled the image of a certain comic book man of steel; mother could be a certain pop-star material girl. They certainly looked the image of American royalty.

"Two sisters…." Justin followed the length of the gallery and counted the children in the portraits. Down the hall approaching the grand stairway was another portrait. "Four sisters…" He counted the two new girls in the second painting in addition to the first two, but at the second landing heading to the main floor was yet another family portrait. "Six sisters?" His feet trudged nervously to the bottom and reached the parquet floor of the main entry hall. A great crystal chandelier was overhead, and Doric columns flanking the main entrance showed the way to halls leading deeper into this great mansion. The floor was a very grand pattern of black and white tiles. A noble Victorian clock built into the arch into the gallery hall under the balcony he had just descended. Up above the walls were decorated in the portraits of this family's ancestors. Noble men and beautiful women in styles of dress from modern to Victorian times looked down to Justin in this great place, but in the place of importance above the entryway was the last portrait of a beautiful grand lady with the image of her dearly departed husband added after his death, her nine children… four sets of female twins in early adolescence to adulthood and one male heir barely a year old. The clothing in the portraits varied, but the faces relatively stayed the same. The mother stayed young and beautiful, father stayed young and handsome except for silver temples. Each portrait seemed to give five to eight year lengths of time judging by how the daughters aged. At this last portrait, the nameplate gave the father's name: Peter Bradford Troy, 1922 to 1987.

"Eight sisters?" Justin stood in shock. "Eight older sisters? I gave up Alex… for this?"

"William…"

"What?" Justin looked up to Gwendolyn Stephanie Troy, the eldest of the eight sisters. Emerging from the archway to the dining room, she was extraordinarily attractive for someone possibly in her late thirties. She had long light blonde hair with soft romantic and regal brown eyes and a slender aristocratic figure and flawless white alabaster skin. Her ruby red lips and brown eyes made her look like a beautiful ivory statue of Venus brought to life. Dressed in a white blouse, light flirty black vest and rich blue designer jeans, she exuded a personal confidence and warm sense of trust.

"Mother sent me to see what was keeping you." She was more respectful and sensible that her more flighty younger sisters. "We're waiting for you at breakfast." She eyed him as if he had forgot.

"Actually…" Justin was heading toward the door. "I'm not hungry. In fact, I've got things…."

"William, you know that's not how we do things…" Gwen took him the shoulders and steered him between the columns for the double doors recessed at the end of the short hall. The room opened up at the top to a large dining room and a grand ten-chair dining table set for breakfast. The head at one end was vacant for the father long lost to the ages; at the other end, the beautiful blonde mother shining over her grown children. Justin could see all of his new sisters at once. Most of them were blonde, some with short blonde hair and some with long tresses of hair. Some of them had very incredible figures while others like Sara and Gwen were more modest. A few glanced up casually, others were more distracted by make-up and cosmetic refinement. Gestured toward the chair next to his new mother, Justin slowly acclimated to being the youngest in a house dominated by the other sex.

"There's my baby boy…" Donna Louise Troy beamed without any trace of the ages on her youthful face. She had to be in her twilight years, but she had the mature perfection of a beauty in her prime. She was the kind of attractive mother his best friends would have had unfulfilled infatuations for their own lives. Justin sat at her right side nervously. Could she tell he wasn't who he was? Could anyone? The beautiful matriarch sensed something amiss and postured a bit as she looked him over. "Sweetheart, is there something wrong." She looked at Justin. "You look… terrified." She turned to his sisters. "What did you girls do to him this time?"

"Nothing… " Their voices echoed and chorused back out of sync.

"It's nothing…" Justin tried to play the role. Nervous and hesitant, he took the glass of orange juice nearest him and sipped it. "Just… tired…" He looked over his eight brand new older sisters down the sides of the table.

"And freezing I bet…" Dressed in a violet sleeveless dress, Lisa smirked hiding a grin. "I doubt he got very much hot water."

There was a short but brief chuckling from various sisters. Lisa sat across from him with a snide grin at him, her elbows on the table and fingers interlaced before her face. To her left was Alicia Sylvia Troy, another beautiful blonde in a casual black dress with a plunging neckline. She sat leaning back in her high-topped chair tapping out letters on her electronic device. Glancing over this clan of siblings, Justin could tell which sisters were twins and who wasn't. Gwen and Lizzie were the oldest and the most statuesque; the two of them just barely resembled each other, but Lizzie still had her natural hair color. Jessica and Kristy were the next youngest, possibly in their late twenties, maybe early thirties. They were both shapely with long blonde hair and bold brown eyes that made guys melt. Sara and Alicia were the third set of twins; athletically proportioned, not quite so bosomy but with an elegant royal grace and presence. Lisa and Tricia were just barely their height; the two bouncy beauties flaunted their figures in tight revealing attire. Sitting at this table was like having breakfast at the Playboy mansion. Each sister was incredibly attractive, all of them blonde except for Lizzie and Lisa, but they did not seem like a vacuous group of blondes. It seemed they had brains. Kristy was reading Hemingway at her table, and Jessica seemed to be some sort of entertainer, speaking to her manager on her cell phone about her next show. Alicia revealed herself to be an anthropologist of some sort, mentioning something about bones from the Tang Dynasty and relics from the Norse region. Despite this façade, something seemed off. They looked way too young for a father who died just over thirty years ago. Their mother looked way too young to be their mother, and yet one of them knew William as an infant. No one here looked older than twenty-five or thirty!

At the head of this table, Donna Troy sat at her unofficial throne beaming enlightened upon her progeny. Her azure blue eyes glistened with godhood, her ruby red lips exuded with a royal presence and her shoulder blonde hair rested atop her white high-collar blouse with a loose unfettered black ladies' tie hanging as decoration down her bosom. Reserved with a slight smile on her lips, she swayed her head to one side and lightly cleared her throat with a sip of juice from her decorative chalice.

"Yes, well…" Donna continued and glanced up briefly as servants carried out plates. "I just wanted you girls to know…" She looked to Justin behind her son's face and reacted embarrassed. "Sorry, honey…" She apologized for leaving him out of that introduction. "I just wanted you to know that after almost a hundred years, we are finally having a family reunion in this house…"

"Grandma-grandma-grandma…" Jessica started chanting with Kristy, Tricia, Alicia and Sara joining in with the chant. Looking a bit surprised, Lizzie suddenly dabbed her lips and sipped her juice.

"Cousins…" She grinned. "Fresh meat…"

Gwen rolled her eyes and sunk back in her seat. Justin looked at his plate and tried to be invisible in this family.

"Yeah…" Donna responded indifferent to how her children responded to their relatives. "Anyway, I've got yard crews coming to clean the gardens, restore the unused wing and prune the shrubbery. No funny business in front of them!"

"Tricia, Lisa…" Kristy leaned forward and looked to her younger sisters. "That means no nude sun-bathing."

Justin started choking on his breakfast as Donna patted his back motherly.

"And that means not asking every guy to come up and help re-arrange your bedroom furniture!" Tricia shot back.

"Oh my god…" Justin did a double take. Not only were his new sisters a bunch of divas, but they were eight man-hungry husband-hunting flirts!

"Hey, I said no funny business…" Donna Troy was obviously a very stern matriarch. "I do not want to be surprised by more grand children…."

Justin started choking on his scrambled eggs as his new mother rubbed his back again.

"Oh yeah…" Tricia whipped out her cell phone. "I forgot to send Brandi money for her birthday…."

"Julie wanted me to ask if you got the birthday gift she sent you." Lisa looked up.

Silently under his breath, Justin sunk back into his seat and gradually assimilated his new family's eccentricities and dirty little secrets. Sipping his juice to regain his composure, his eyes widened in stunned shock and placed his chalice down uttering one silent "wow" under his breath.

"Yes, tell her I got the clock." Donna regained her composure again. "Is there anything else?" She looked to her rice and eggs.

"Oh…" Her cleavage nearly pouring out of her dress, Alicia leaned forward toward Justin. "William," She called him by his new name. "Ally called…"

"Ally?" Silently eyeing his breakfast plate of scrambled eggs, large sausages and cheese-covered chopped potatoes, Justin wondered who that was.

"Your fiancée?" Kristy reminded him.

Justin suddenly coughed up the juice on his lips, sending an eruption of juice and spit across the table into the face of the nearest sister. Sara and Alicia leaned back as Lisa sitting across the table received the worst of it. She dropped her fork to her plate and froze out of disgusted surprise.

"Thank you…" She replied sarcastically. "Thank you… oh, so much…" She rose dabbing her face of her brother's drink and to change her clothes upstairs.

"William…" Surprised and ecstatic, Donna turned to Justin. "Are you two engaged?"

"Engaged?" Justin screeched under breath. Who the heck was Ally?

"Lecy, stop that…" Gwen responded as the only responsible sister and eyed her obnoxious sister with derision. "Mom, Lisa and Tricia have a conspiracy with Ally to get William to re-pop the question. Just the other day, Sara helped them tie old shoes and cans to the back of his car as…" She looked to the young man she thought was her brother. "Incentive."

"Yes…" Sara dripped hollandaise sauce from her spoon to her scrambled eggs. "I helped them, and next week I'm hiring a bunch of kids to follow you around and call you… Daddy!" She smirked toward Justin and dipped her spoon into her mouth to taste the sauce on her tongue. She didn't seem that ornery; behind that mischievous side was a sense of true respect – a sister who teased her brother because she loved him.

"I call dibs on his room…" Jessica stuck her left arm up. "I need to get as far away from Kristy as possible."

"Hey…" Kristy looked down the table excitedly. "If William gets married, can I put in a door to Jessica's room? I need more closet space!"

"For the last time," Donna put her glass chalice down. "I am not giving permission for anyone to knock down any walls or create any new doorways. That's what the enchantments are there for. We are leaving the house exactly as it was when I was young. You girls can either get rid of your excess clothes or store them in the empty servant's quarters in the attic."

"But that's too far away…" Kristy groused.

"There's a secret passage…" Alicia beamed secretly. "As if I'm telling anyone where it is…"

The candles on the table suddenly flashed and sparked. Everyone jumped at the flash including Justin. The only problem was… they were never lit.

"Stop the sniping…" Donna was the only one who hadn't jumped at the tiny fireworks; it was almost as if she had caused them to flare and pop. "Like I said, get rid of the excess clothes. Half of the North Wing looks like the ladies wardrobe department at the mall!"

"But I don't like conjuring my own clothes…" Jessica sat back grousing. "Buying them is so much more fun…"

Almost everyone agreed with that.

"Materialize them out of the photo ads like I do…" Lisa returned to the dining room in a tasteful black and white ensemble with a blue belt. "At least… I'm not hiding clothes in the closets of empty bedrooms…" She kicked Kristy's chair on the way back to her chair.

"That explains all the naked models in my Cosmo!" Tricia screamed.

"At least, I wear underwear!" Kristy shot a venomous look at Lisa.

"Honey…" Donna rolled her eyes tired of this morning clash of egos, gave Justin a light kiss to the cheek and rose from the table after daintily dabbing her lips of her breakfast. "I've got work to do. Have a nice day…" Justin looked at her and then a bit afraid of his new sisters.

"What kind of wizard family did I land in…" He silently asked himself.


	4. Chapter 4

4

In the foyer, Justin found notepaper by the phone stenciled with the address: Maison Troia, P.O. Box 3624, Collinwood, Maine, 36246. His bedroom was in the South Wing of the hundred and fifty room house with his mother, Gwen, Lizzie and Tricia in a portion of those ten bedrooms and the upstairs library. The North Wing with the erratic fuse box was housed with the rest of the psycho sisters; it had access to the in-door swimming pool and a rear stairway linked to the attic and cellar. The west wing linked both those parts of the house, but it was mostly unused except for use as a short cut from wing to wing and storage of furniture. The interior was decorated in Eighteenth Century Europe; the furnishings were French, German, English and Spanish. Telephones rested at the end of each upstairs hallway, the entryway, the study, the kitchen and the stables on the property with three separate phone lines. Justin explored narrow circular stairways, winding stairways, balconies, forgotten chambers and long galleries of artwork. The castle-like structure was like a museum with sculptures, paintings, portraits and historical pieces ranging from Civil War rifles to French swords to Chinese samurai armor. The estate was in the middle of a set of rolling hills surrounded by woodland, paths, gardens and elaborate patios and porticos. He could see himself living here, but he also could not get over the feeling he did not belong here. Where he tried calling home, the phone back home on Waverly Place either rang and rang and rang, or came up busy. What was going on back there? Didn't anyone miss him? What was going on? At lunch, it was just himself, his mother and Alicia for tomato soup. For dinner, it was himself again, his mother, Jessica, Tricia and Gwen. He tried calling home again after dinner and got a busy signal. Retiring to his room after another attempted phone call home at midnight, he also woke at 5AM, used the upper south wing phone to try and call home and let it ring seventeen times before giving up. He should have been happy. He was a rich heir with eight beautiful sisters, an ageless widowed clothing designer as his mother and a huge estate with everything in the world, but as he trudged back to his room in his robe and slippers, he felt himself missing his life back on Waverly Place. The following morning, he hurried to the far wing to attempt another call after breakfast. After thirty-one attempts, it was another busy signal.

"Alex!" Justin screamed through the phone. "Get off the stinking line!"

Jessica crossed behind him from the ascending oak staircase. She stopped, looked back at her brother, grinned curiously and tossed her hair back.

"Who's Alex?"

"Alex?" Justin hemmed and hedged a bit. "Alex… Um, she's… just a… really annoying girl!"

"Ally's going to be upset if you're cheating on her."

"Trust me…" Justin fretted a bit and started to turn to the study. "Alex means nothing to me. Nothing at all!"

Rounding her eyes a bit, Jessica nodded her head a bit and turned hastening her steps to the entry way and foyer. Several of her sisters were sporting purses and designer jackets. They were going somewhere. Lizzie had confirmed the limo and the plane.

"New York City…." Alicia was dancing. "Shopping spree…"

Justin popped to attention.

"Fine dining…." Lizzie announced her preference.

"Guys on every corner…." Jessica hiked up her boobs by her bra straps under her t-shirt.

"Wait…" Justin overheard and came running from the hallway to the main study and came to a sudden stop, his feet sliding on the black and white parquet floor near his new sisters. "Hey…" He caught up with them. "You're going to New York City? Manhattan?"

"That's…" Sara looked around her sisters. "Where it is…"

"Can I go with you?" Justin needed the way to get back to Waverly Place. "I need to… get… things…"

His sisters looked at each other hesitantly.

"Didn't you say after the last time you'd never go to Manhattan with one of us ever again?" Jessica reminded him.

"What?" Justin had no idea what the basis for that decision was. "Did I say that? No… I don't recall… I mean, whatever you did, I can forgive you…"

"Oh…." Sarah walked up to Justin and peered into his eyes. "So, if a creepy guy comes up to me, you'll pretend to be my boyfriend and at least try to defend my honor…. Maybe give me a little kiss…" She clicked her tongue.

Justin swallowed something in his throat the size of a golf ball.

"I think I could manage that."

"Ground rules…" Lizzie spoke up opening the main doors leading outside. "No spells, no hexes, no enchantments… Alicia, if a guy turns you down, no turning him into a woman. Jessica, we are using real money so don't be flashing any gold or silver ingots or doubloons. William, if trouble breaks out, no turning yourself into Superman, Batman, Spider-Man or anyone from your comic books to deal with it…"

Justin stopped and stood in the sunlight on the front portico to realize what she had said. Hesitating to dismiss that, he just hastened his way down the fifteen steps ascending down over bushes and a surrounding coy pond flowing under the walk to a circular driveway at the bottom. A mix of oak and maple trees with a heavy canopy surrounded the center yard of the driveway over a large round marble gazebo. Parked at the base was a long black stretch limousine with a grinning chauffeur. He was dressed as a driver in a black suit and bright blue shirt with a red tie. Each of the girls called him Bruce in their own way and was responded to as "lady" and "madam" with Justin referred to as "master." The five siblings crowded into the back on to leather seats and made their plans and arrangements, but Justin was more interested in the ride and the scenery. Perched silently in the side seat by a mini-fridge with bottled water, he watched as the drive out from Maison Troia included an acre and a half of woodland out through gilded gates on to a two-lane highway. The small hamlet of Collinwood seemed to be a village of maybe two thousand people surrounded by woodland. Drivers and motorists tried to look into the windows from their vehicles, pedestrians stopped and watched as the limo passed by homes, the courthouse, businesses and a city hall toward the town square and the baseball fields beyond the local school. On the other side of town heading westerly toward Bangor was Andrew Hancock Airfield, named for a local World War Two hero. The limo stopped at a gate and rolled right out on to the tarmac for a small Cessna N23, the family plane. Feeling the austere presence of the young heir he was supposed to be, Justin joined his sisters on board the plane and again took a quiet sitting spot at a window to sit in silence. Jessica got into the sherry on board, and Sara pulled out the ear phones to listen to music. As the plane taxied out and took flight, Justin was starting to like this life. Of course, he had a grand life in this one with opulence and wealth, but it also came with crazy sisters and a family history he knew nothing about, but there was also something pulling him back to Waverly Place, his wizard training and, yes, even he realized it, the worst sister on the face of the planet.

"William…"

Listening to headphones on the advance to La Guardia Airport, Justin turned to Sara leaning toward him from her seat. Lizzie, Jessica and Alicia were listening.

"Yes…"

"Who's Alex?" She looked back to him. "Are you dating another girl after Ally shot down your wedding proposal?"

"I'm not dating anyone named Alex." Justin swayed his arm dramatically. "And that is the truth!"

"Is she cute?"

"Does she have a brother?"

"Does she have money?"

"Please tell me she's got a brain…"

"No, yes, no and God no!" Justin answered their questions. "Look, she's just a girl I know… a really annoying girl I know…"

"Then why did you call her in the middle of the night?" Sara looked over. She'd been practicing her Ninja arts last night and was hanging off the ceiling eavesdropping around 5AM.

"Because…." Justin wasn't sure how to tell them the truth without confusing them or getting hit with more questions he couldn't answer. "Because… she's evil."

His four sisters looked at him for several seconds then turned back to themselves.

"He thinks girls are evil again…." Jessica claimed and picked up another celebrity magazine with Hannah Montana on the cover. Another few minutes and the pilot announced the plane was on ascent. Alicia downed her sherry in one gulp, Sara clipped her belt and Lizzie tidied up the table between the seats before flipping it back down. Justin looked out the window grinning to see the New York skyline. He was home or at least part of the way there. Checking his watch, he realized he just might make his first class at Tribeca Prep. All he had to do was pretend to drift apart from his sisters… casually drift back to get fifty bucks for a cab ride and then lose them again in the terminal to race out an entrance to grab a cab. He couldn't scream Waverly Place fast enough to the driver as his destination. It was then a long drive home where he and the Jamaican driver talked everything from sports to recipes until he was dropped off in front of Chang's Thai Restaurant five blocks from his house. His heart was pounding as he raced the rest of the way on foot. Looking ahead, the Waverly Station Subway Shop reared up on the corner up ahead. Coming out the front exit was a familiar face. Alex did not look as if she missed her brother. She hoisted her pack with her schoolbooks over her shoulder, rolled her eyes tiredly and started down the sidewalk coming into a collision with her long lost older brother.

"Alex!" Justin skidded to a stop dressed as a young heir in tan pants, white shirt and blue blazer. "Alex, it's me, you've got to help me!"

"Excuse me?" Alex backed from him distressed and annoyed to be bothered by him. "Do I know you?"

"Alex, I'm your brother!" Justin tried to convince her. "It's me Justin! The other night I wished you weren't my sister, and it came true! You've got to take me back!"

Alex barely responded to him. Her brown eyes lightly moved nervously afraid as she realized what he was saying.

"Alex," Justin held her by her arms. "I know you know what I'm talking about because you're a wizard. I know that because I'm one too! I want you back as my sister. You've got to take me back! I just can't live in another family! Those girls are crazy!"

"Let me get this straight…" Alex lightly stepped back with a devious grin. "You're Justin, and you're my brother?"

"Yes, thank you!" Justin thought everything was going to be all right. "You've got to tell mom and dad so we can fix things."

"Huh…" Alex rolled her eyes thinking. "This is all very interesting… except for one little thing."

"What little thing?"

"Alex…" Another Justin Russo came hurrying down the street from the corner and caught up with Alex in front of the coffee shop. "Mom wanted me to remind you to be right home after school for your shift in the store. No exceptions." He looked up to Justin but didn't recognize him. "And this is…?"

"Oh, Justin…" Alex turned to her brother. "You ought to know this person. He says he's you." She smirked matter-of-factly as if she was trying not to laugh.

"Wow…" The other Justin responded unimpressed. "And here I was thinking I was Justin Russo…"

"No…" Justin backed from his sister and himself feeling as if he was losing his mind. "No… This isn't possible! This just isn't possible!" He backed away from them unsure what to believe. Alex and himself stared at him as if he was crazy. "What did I do? Who am I? Who am I?" He shook his head and tripped backward into a newspaper machine, turned round stumbling over his feet and vaulted around the car parked at the curb to hasten across the street and down toward the way toward the old theater on the corner. Left behind, Alex and her brother looked at each other, shrugged their shoulders and continued onward for school.

"Gee, I hope he figures out who he is." She responded almost concerned.

"Yeah," Justin reared his backpack with his books over his shoulder. "Can you imagine going through life not knowing who you were?" He took his sister's left hand in his right. When he squeezed it, she looked up to him with a light smile. Passing the coffee shop and coming up on the following movie rental place, she dropped her book bag, turned her head up and started kissing him. His hand tilted up her chin as she kissed him back.

"I wish you could keep Justin away forever!" She gasped between giggling breaths of kissing her brother's imposter.


	5. Chapter 5

5

"William…" Gwen looked in on her brother. "Are you okay?" Since he had returned from Manhattan, Justin had been laying on his bed depressed. Who was he? Was he Justin Russo of Waverly Place, or was he William Troy of Collinwood, Maine? He had skipped lunch, he skipped dinner and as he looked behind to Gwen at the door from his bed, he had long streaks of tears running down his face to his pillow. Gwen gasped to see him hurting. When his heart broke, her heart broke. After their mother, she had practically raised him all his life. She was his favorite sister and except for maybe Sara, the only one he was the most close to. Entering his room, Gwen sat close to him and pulled him up to her, hugging him and draping his head to her shoulder.

"Sara said some girl named Alex broke your heart." She whispered to him delicately.

"Alex Russo isn't…" Justin stopped. "She's nothing…"

"Was she really worth it?"

"It wasn't about her…" Justin felt familial bonding he'd never felt before in his other life. "It was about… something I think I wanted. Something… I thought was better than this life…."

"What are you talking about?" Gwen tried wiping away his tears.

"I…" Justin choked on his feelings and struggled with them. He tried to decide what to say, but his thoughts and feelings were in turmoil as he struggled to understand them. "Who am I?" He finally asked.

"You're William Troy…" Gwen's eyes filled with tears as she saw the little boy in her brother's face and smiled lightly to him. "The greatest little brother any girl could ever have…" She tried fixing his hair. She'd been sort of his nanny since he was five years old at a time in her life that the sisters were scattered and living across the world without their mother around to watch them. It was only until a few years ago that they all started to try and live under this house. She peered into her brother's face and palmed his head in her hand as she tried smoothing out his hair sticking up from the pillow. "How about an ice cream sundae like I used to make you when you were little…."

"Sundae…" Justin realized there was a lot more right about this family than wrong with it. "With nuts and chocolate syrup?"

"How else do I make them?" She looked back with a maternal bearing, suggesting she was possibly a mom at some point in her life. Her arm draped around her brother as they turned for the hallway, Justin's feet just barely scuffling along on the carpet as they headed toward the front gallery and the main staircase. As they descended down into the front hall, Alicia was coming down the opposing stairway from the North Wing, but she looked different this time. She seemed taller, her hair was much longer and the front of her dress was more… filled out than usual. She looked more like Kristy or Jessica in build. Justin's eyes rounded in surprise to see her more bosomy and even more shapely. Gwen draped her hand down over his eyes.

"You've got to be kidding me…" Gwen spoke barely surprised. Alicia was not the first sister to affect her own appearance with magic to attract a potential new boyfriend. "What are you doing with Jessica's body?"

"I really want this new guy to like me." She posed a bit getting used to her new curves. "This… will do it."

"What kind of standard are you setting for our little brother?" Gwen responded rationally as Justin peeked between her fingers. "You're the one always complaining about how guys don't appreciate you for having a brain."

"I see it like this…" Alicia moved Gwen's hand from Justin's face. "I'm fighting the war from both sides. I'm teaching him to never underestimate women, and besides, Jessica would kill for this body. God knows her brain is not exactly reaching the top floor!" She tucked her sunglasses on and tilted her head upward into a pose. "I'm off to Paris for dinner!" She announced as if she was going off to war and strutted defiantly across the parquet on her way out the front entrance floor with her heels tapping out a message and a warning for all guys in her future. The only thing Gwen could do was sigh, lower her head defeatedly with her forefingers to the center of her forehead and lightly shake her head defeatedly.

"Do me a favor…" She spoke to Justin tiredly. "Marry Ally, move out, travel far away from here and take me with you."

"What a family…" Justin mumbled as he realized his place in it. Gwen placed her right arm around his shoulder and guided him down the main downstairs gallery under the family portrait. "Wait…Paris?" Justin reacted looking back to her. "There's no way the plane's going to get her to Paris in time for dinner!"

"Who said she's taking the plane?" Gwen looked to him distractedly. Outside the mansion, something shot overhead with the sound of a bullet cutting through the sky toward the east and out over the Atlantic Ocean. Alarmed and worriedly distraught, Justin made a face that again challenged his existence in this house. Were these people wizards or something else? They knew magic, they spoke about spells and they talked matter-of-factly about enchantments as if it was no big deal, and yet, they seemed far younger than they appeared and mastered powers beyond his understanding of wizardry. Gwen grinned to him like a loving sister as they passed the side arch into their mother's study. Illuminated by sunlight through the windows of the garden, she stood in the center of the room, several books gliding through the air toward her, pausing for her eyes and returning to the shelves. It was as if she was surrounded by several invisible servants carrying books to her as her hands and gestures controlled their traffic. She guided them, controlled them and mentally influenced seven to eight books revolving around her as they shared their pages.

"Hi, babies…" She grinned to her son and daughter and guided another book back to its place.

"I'll be there in a minute…" Justin looked to Gwen as she good-naturedly pinched the back of his neck, lit up with a bright grin and turned onward for the kitchen. Standing unsure at first, Justin took a light breath once and again and stood at the threshold of the study. Donna Troy was psychokinetically returning more of the books floating in the air near her to their places on the shelves. She scowled at one, gestured another away with one finger and pointed at another to come gliding toward her.

"Your grandmother is so frustrating…" She posed with fingertips to her forehead, one hand on her hip and perused the lines in a large parchment covered journal before scoffing annoyingly and returning that one with a spell to the shell. "She leaves me her spell book of recipes, and I have no idea what I did with the silly thing. She wants me to make her favorite dish, and I can't make it by memory! I need her book. I'm thinking it could be mixed in with the books in your library upstairs." She tilted her head effervescently to her only son. "Did you want something, sweetheart?"

"You know…mom…" Justin was not used to saying that to her yet. "I was thinking... I was thinking about my… wizard training." He looked to see how she reacted, but she just glanced at him and levitated another book to the shelf and turned round to her desk.

"Wizard training?" She said it matter-of-factly. "That's what you chose to go into?" She sat at her chair behind her Queen Anne desk, extended her legs under it then curled beneath her chair with the presence of a powerful businesswoman and leaned back in her seat, her chin nearly touching her chest as she took a breath. Her eyes blinked a few times as she looked her son over. "Are you sure you want to study wizardry? It would limit you to spells only accomplished by a wand."

"There are others?" Justin reacted. This woman was not a stranger to the magic world.

"If that's what you want, sweetheart, I can get you into Alexandria or Hogwarts…" Donna Troy posed sideways in her chair then chuckled secretly. "Old Dumbledore would have a conniption of he knew how many of us were passing through his school."

"Yes, one of us…" Justin pretended to understand.

"I know where I left that book." Donna rose regally with the austere presence of a monarch and glided past the windows to the garden outside. "Darling…" She pulled Justin close and kissed his head. "Let me make some calls and I'll get back to you." She entered the alcove into the gallery and glided onward to the kitchen leaving Justin behind still confused and wanting for answers.

"What kind of family did I wish myself into?" Justin was still not ready to accept his life as one William Troy. He sighed, ran his fingers distraught and anxious through his hair and dropped to the big easy chair by the suit of armor in the room. As he looked up to that Old Saxon conversation piece, his eyes gazed the books on the shelf by his side and lifted his gaze higher to the albums. One was titled "England 1930 to 1950" and other was chronicled "Maison Troia – Construction," but it was the emerald book with the gold lettering that caught his interest. It read: "Our Family History."

"Well, I am a member of the family now." Justin smirked, stood and pulled the album down, then dropped back into the chair. One leg up to brace the book, his fingers paraded over the green leather covering. It was almost two inch thick and fourteen inches high and another twelve inches in size. It looked more like an old grimoire in age, but it had a very modern gold clasp sealing it. His fingers flipped the latch sideways and slipped up the belt to open it, light and puffs of smoke coming from it as the cover and pages parted.

Justin's brown eyes widened in shock to see the opening images coming alive for him. It was a photo of the front of the estate, but the clouds were moving, the trees were swaying and images of deer were scampering across the isolated Maine estate. Leaves churned through the image, one leaf blowing out of the book and becoming three dimensional and actual in the real world. He quickly closed the album. The leaf flowed up through the center of the room and then lightly descended upon the carpet in the middle of the room.

"What kind of family is this?" Justin asked himself and tried again. He opened the cover again and lightly turned the first pages over to the dedication: "_To our ancestors who are always among us_."

Forcing himself to push forward, Justin both feared and wanted to know what was on the next page. There was one blank page and then another page with one sentence: "_This is our family_…"

His hand was shaking as the edge of the page slid down his fore finger. Once those pages parted, more smoke started billowing from the book. It was coming from a grand photo across two pages, the image of a powerful white-bearded figure in dark blue and white-speckled robes and his wife, a beautiful brunette woman of incredible stature and great beauty wearing flowers in her hair and flowing green robes. They were posed as a loving couple, looking at each other and out from the book in that moving image, emblazoned on the pages for their descendants to see them again. In a white strip across around the border of the living three-dimensional image, it read the following words.

"_Our ancestors were named Atum and Gaea, they were the parents of the first fifteen families of Earth to guide mortal man out of the Stone Age. They taught humanity civilization, created thought and were the first great kings. They were the first spirits of heaven and earth from whom everything came forward. Everything we have came from them, and for this we are grateful_."

Justin scowled confusingly and looked around the room worried he could get in trouble with this book. He turned the heavy parchment-like paper to another page with a vast image full of Greek and Roman architecture and incredible living plants. Their leaves poked with life out of the book and around them faeries and elves danced and ran around in the photo. A figure waving a hammer illuminated the skies casting lightning, beautiful girls basked around a grand fountain and waved hello to Justin from the borders. Through the image casually walked Atum and Gaea from the left side to the right side of the page. Around the margin in Old Greek lettering was more history.

"_Atum and Gaea had many children who lived apart distantly and culturally, but at the end of the Roman Empire, many of the great sky-gods decided to break ties with mortal man. They had stopped believing in gods, and this was good; the immortals of Earth did not want to be gods. It was time for our mortal children to live without us. They were discovering science and exploring the world, creating inventions and reaching to other worlds. Most of the other Immortals of Earth rather than live apart in their separate realms began living on Earth in mortal roles, taking mortal identities. Around 1000 AD, the son of Odin, Balder of Asgard, courted Aphrodite, daughter of Zeus, and they had six daughters who married mortal men. This was the start of the Odinson-Reason-Troy family tree_…."

"I can't believe this…" Justin started hastening ahead to individual family member pages with biographies and family trees. "They're demigods… They're all demigods!" He then realized the greater truth. "_I'm a demigod now_!" He stopped on his page. Across the top was the name, William Balder Troy – Collinwood, Maine.

"_William Balder Troy, born 1987, is the last child and only son of Peter Bradford Troy, grandson of Hercules of Olympus and Brigid of Avalon, and Donna Louise Reason, daughter of Apollo of Olympus and Marilyn Jean Reason, daughter of Thor and Aphrodite. Possible magic involves his birth one year after his father's death, an incident that left his mother mentally incapable of rearing him for the first years of his life. Reared by demigoddess Emma Samuelson and tutored by Samantha Stoddard of Lauperville, California, he actually platonically dated three of his sisters before his true identity was revealed. Well-known for posing as a historian and adventurer_…"

"This… this… This is me? I'm a demigod now?" Justin squirmed a bit uncomfortable with the revelation. "This can't be me. This can't be me!" When he met Sara for the first time, she had remarked, "she could not go back there." Was that in reference to this accidental relationship? Who were the other sisters? He thumbed backward several pages trying to find their bios in the book. Gwen had been a singer during Prohibition, Alicia was photographed near Mahatma Gandhi, Sara had worked backstage on "The Wizard Of Oz," Jessica had been in the French Resistance during World War Two and both Lisa and Tricia had posed as high school students through the Late Fifties to the Late Eighties. The book fell open on a face he knew very well…

"_Marilyn Elizabeth Jean Odinson, daughter of Thor of Asgard and Aphrodite of Olympus, born 1037 AD, also known as Lady Marilyn of Britain, Countess Mary Jean of Burgundy, Mary Lynn Reason, Jean Monroe, Mary Kate Reason and Norma Jean Baker. Known to the public as actress/model Marilyn Monroe who faked her death in 1962…"_

"No way!" Justin was shaking his head. "No way! This… This is grandma? I can't believe this! I can't believe this!"

"William…" Kristy was another one of the elder sisters, younger than Gwen and Lizzie and the twin of Jessica, but older than Sara, Alicia, Tricia and Lisa. She entered the library from the front hallway wearing a long overcoat and surprised Justin. "I need your opinion on something. How does this look?" She opened her overcoat and allowed to it to slide to the floor and reveal she was barely wearing a scanty dark blue bikini with over the shoulder spaghetti straps holding it together. She posed with her hands on her hips and a big giggling grin knowing how her brother would scream and run from the room every time they tried to be sexy, but this was not her brother before her. It was one Justin Russo, and the young wizard could only gaze upon her in surprise to have this impossibly beautiful woman posing for him. Kristy stood for about thirty seconds waiting for the usual screams and cries of shock-induced blindness.

"It looks…" Justin cleared his throat loudly. "Hot…"

"Oh…" Kristy started feeling awkward for some reason, and turned her back to her brother to pick up the overcoat. Pulling it back on, she looked at the person she thought was her brother, pulled her long blonde locks free and cleared her throat herself. "Okay… that was a bit… uncomfortable. Excuse me…" She headed back through the long hall in her bare feet toward the main hall. Stepping through the archway, she immediately noticed Sara daintily hopping her way down the staircase; her blonde locks bobbing on her dark blouse as Kristy met her at the bottom threshold. Kristy placed her hand to Sara's shoulder.

"Something weird happened." Kristy spoke first. "I showed our brother my new bikini…" She flashed it to Sara modestly. "And for once, he didn't run screaming out of the room from hysterical blindness." She paused out of confusion. "If I didn't know better… I'd think he was drooling."

"Well…" Sara thought about it. "Either he's found a new way to mess with us… or he's not really our brother."


	6. Chapter 6

6

According to the book, Justin discovered that more than a few of the family's more distant relatives were famous Hollywood celebrities. Brad Pitt, Jessie McCartney, Reese Witherspoon, Justin Bieber, Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, Tom Cruise and Salma Hayek to name a few, and several others not so famous had been involved in some famous historical events. He had a great uncle who was on the Lewis and Clark expedition, an aunt who was on the Titanic, a cousin who was blamed for both the San Francisco Fire and the Old Seattle Fire and another cousin who had worked as a chef in the White House for Presidents Zachary Taylor to Ulysses S. Grant. There was also a bit of history on the mansion. Originally named Stoddard House, the structure had been built by Gregory Robert Bradford in 1848, his own mortal grandfather, for a munitions industrialist named Walter Lord, but after Lord's death, Peter Bradford Troy acquired it for Donna after the turn of the century and lost it during the Great Depression. The Troy family had sold the estate after the stock market had crashed in the Thirties, instead moving to live out west in California during World War Two. After sitting empty for forty years, Donna finally got it back in the Late Eighties, about the time William was born while she was stuck in the house by a snowstorm that left her alone for a month and a half. The only question was… was Justin really that child?

"Are you reading that book again?"

Justin jumped from surprise from the chair.

"Did I scare you?" Lisa stood before her brother in a form fitting black sweater and blue jeans. Her bright blue eyes twinkled and her captivating grin illuminating her flawless movie star-like good looks. She tilted her head to one side as her long brown hair cascaded over one shoulder.

"I was just…." Justin closed the book, palmed it along it's binding and nervously postured with his head before her. "You know… refreshing myself on our relatives. I mean… we got a big family reunion coming…"

"Yeah, well…" Lisa came gliding up further as she gazed deeply into his big brown eyes. "I can't believe you'd need reminding. You updated the book."

"What?"

"You're the one who updated it." Lisa pointed to the updated version from 2000 with gold-ended pages and the white leather cover resting on the mantel over the fireplace in the room. A green satin ribbon parted through the center of the book between the bios for Michael Clinton Odinson and Michelle Deianeira Odinson. It was a larger thicker version of the first edition. Justin glanced toward it and back to Lisa. Her head tilted to one side, she looked at Justin in a curious state; her gaze looking him up and over and then leaning in to analyze every feature of his face. "Mom asked you to do it…" She reminded him.

"Is there a problem?" Justin pressed the older edition back to its place on the shelf, crossed his arms before his chest and scowled at her suspicious activity.

"Oh…" Lisa's hand gestured casually. "Kristy got this crazy idea that you're an imposter or something…" Lisa stepped back and shifted her weight to her other leg. "She said you were checking her out?"

"Where'd she get that idea?" Justin reacted nervously afraid. Was his presence in this house exposed?

"Where does she get her ideas?" Lisa responded annoyingly with her head shaking in short annoyed movements. "She still thinks the refrigerator is run by faeries!"

Justin chuckled under breath. Admittedly, there were parts of this family he liked, but over all, he just wanted to go home.

"By the way," Lisa acted as if she was dusting and preening Justin. "Grandma arrived with Aunt Cyndi and Aunt Paula, and they all want to see how tall and handsome the man of the house has become…" She grinned mischievously and turned away. "But since there's no such person, you'll have to take his place."

"What?" Justin screeched as she turned away giggling for the stairs in the hallway. Was Lisa being facetious or did she know otherwise? Could she have figured out that he was out he was not the person he was supposed to be? He couldn't take that chance. He started for the back way through the kitchen then heard voices in the kitchen coming through and instead followed Lisa's footsteps into the hallway and started quickening his steps into the great foyer, but he was not fast enough. More voices came from the dining room far across from him and he looked up like a deer in headlights. As Donna Troy guided her mother and sisters around the various renovations, Justin recognized his grandmother and knew who she had without a doubt. She had been born Mary Elizabeth Jean Odinson in Eleventh Century England, and she had used the alias Norma Jean Baker during the Second World War. During the Fifties and Sixties, she was known to the public as Marilyn Monroe, wrapping that mortal existence with a fake death scene and favors with the help of President John F. Kennedy. Who knew that that Hollywood sex symbol was actually a demigoddess far older than she appeared? She must have stopped aging at thirty-five. Her bright blonde hair was short and vivacious, framing a bright red beaming grin and her blue aristocratic eyes, which twinkled with the stars of the sky at night. She was a photo brought to life. Her vivacious childlike demeanor had not faded, her figure shaped by a three-piece pink jacket, vest and skirt combo. Accompanied by three of her four daughters, all resembling three certain pop stars from the Eighties, she admired the grandness and austerity of the mansion. Petite and brunette, Aunt Paula was a shapely beauty in a black blouse and brown slacks and jacket. The former choreographer now taught dance out in California. Just as petite and just a bit more slender, Aunt Cyndi wore a black shoulderless top that showed off her figure with a form fitting blue skirt that extended down to her knees. She looked exactly like the vivacious Chicago socialite known for tabloid exploits with all of Hollywood's top leading single men. Her voice cackled at one of Paula's comments about Donna's taste in furnishings. Rolling her eyes to her mother, Donna just happened to casually look aloft from a brief memory and noticed Justin, quickly waving him over with her left hand with tasteful decorum.

"William, darling…" Donna gestured her son closer. "Your grandmother would like to see you again."

"I can't… you see, I've got…" Justin tried hurrying off, but Donna came after him, corralled him with her arm around him to guide him back to the other side of the foyer.

"Who's this?" Marilyn asked in her honeyed voice.

"Mother, this is William…" Donna held Justin in place. "You haven't seen him since he was eleven, but…"

"That's not William." Donna's sister, Cyndi, reacted confused and saw through the veil of magic.

"What are you talking about?"

Justin froze; his feet freezing to the spot and his eyes frightfully peering from them and back to the entryway.

"That's not William." Donna's other sister Paula also noticed and passed her fingers over her sister's eyes to remove the illusion she was seeing. Donna looked again and realized she did not know the young man she was embracing and jumped back in shock. Her son was a tall, good-looking young man with her eyes and his father's steely grin. This young man pretending to be him was just barely the same size but leaner in build. The imposture was over.

"What? How… Who are you?" Donna Troy was taken aback both shocked and embarrassed as she looked back and again unprepared; her open lips too stunned for words upon discovering this deception. "Where's my son and why are you trying to be him?"

"That is a very good question!" Justin stood terrified for his life. "You see, I'm, uh… uh, who am I? Oh yeah… Justin Russo, and, uh, uh…"

"Watch what you say next, junior…." Paula folded her arms before her chest. "You've got four very ticked off demigoddesses here very fluent in sorcery."

"Sorcery?" Justin's voice went up a few octaves.

"Where is my son?" Donna Troy's angry voice stirred up thunder off the Atlantic coast as she spoke.

"I don't know!" Justin backed way and fell into the bench at the bottom of the grand staircase, but in his terrified thoughts, he started figuring everything out in his head. "Wait! I've got a very good idea where he is!"

"This better be good!"


	7. Chapter 7

7

Way to the south and toward the tip of the island purchased so long ago by Peter Minuit from the local indigenous tribes of the area was the community of Waverly Place not far from Greenwich Village. Located atop former farm community was several businesses owned and run by the descendants of the immigrants who had traveled to this area to create new lives in this the United States. In a secret back room of the Waverly Sub Shop, Jerry Russo taught his children the mystical arts of his wizard ancestors, a family directly descended far enough from the legendary god kings of Ancient Greece to practice magic and wizardry but not close enough to be immortal.

"Justin…" Jerry Russo called for his first-born. "You're up first. Remember… _Constantus corinthius_…"

"Yeah…" Justin stood from the sofa assuredly confidante, looked back at Alex grinning ear to ear then Max sitting bored on the end and looked back on his father. This was an incantation for transforming salt water into fresh water for drinking. Spinning his wand round his fingers, he beamed to his father and scratched his hair with the tip of his wand in his left hand then snapped the fingers of his right hand.

"Constantus corinthus!" He remarked then shook his wand. Drawing his wand back, he shifted back and forth on his feet and folded his arms assuredly.

"Why did you snap your fingers?" Jerry had noticed Justin snapping his fingers.

"I didn't snap my fingers." Justin reacted confused. "Alex, did I snap my fingers?" He looked to his loving sister.

"I didn't hear him snap his fingers, dad." Alex responded just as adamant.

"No, I heard him snap his fingers." Max remarked, and Alex elbowed him hard to the ribs. Leaning forward from the pain, Max groaned as his father checked the accuracy of Justin's spell. He had filled the glass with saltwater, but tasting it, he had none of the gagging salt taste. It was cool and refreshing as he drank it up.

"It didn't matter…" Jerry gasped from that wonderful drink. "It worked. It even tasted a bit sugary and minty!"

"Of course…" Justin grinned as he took his seat. He and Alex grinned at each other secretly as she took her turn at a second glass of saltwater. Standing up before her father, Alex pretended to stir her wand at the glass of saltwater. Justin snapped his fingers again.

"Constantus correctus!" Grinning secretly, Alex said the spell with her wand.

"Justin, you snapped your fingers again..." Jerry definitely heard it that time. He looked at his daughter, checked her spell and sipped from her glass. Once more, he had cool and refreshing fresh water mystically transferred from saltwater. He gasped contently from that second drink.

"… And Alex, you said the wrong words, and yet, it still worked!" He still had her fresh water on his lips. "And it tastes sugary and minty again! What the heck's going on around here?"

"I guess I'm just getting really good at my wizardry!" Alex shined happily with a big grin to her face. She had never been this exuberant. Turning round, her hand reached to high five her older brother and she took her seat again to lean into Justin and support her head in her hand with her elbow on his shoulder. They had been acting really close for the last few days, and Max couldn't stand it. He looked at them frustratedly confused and annoyed. Taking his wand, he waited as his father took out the last glass of saltwater.

"Okay…" Max got ready, cleared his throat and waved his wand. "_Constantus corinthus_!"

Justin snapped his fingers again as Max's glass belched and filled with mud. It belched forward with a thin disgusting dirt and muddy water concoction. Jerry jumped back in surprise. Alex hid her face in her older brother's back and giggled secretly. Justin started acting innocent and distracted.

"Max…" Jerry was disappointed. "You got mud again!"

"I haven't got one spell right in three days!" Max complained. "What's going on here?"

"Awwww, Max…" Justin grinned to him with Alex in his back. "You'll get one right sooner or later. Keep trying, little buddy."

"Justin's right, Max…" Jerry supported his youngest boy. "I mean… he's been snapping his fingers a lot the last few days…. " Jerry reacted suspiciously confused to him then turned back to Max. "But you'll get one right sooner or later." He looked at Alex practically seducing her brother and looked even more confused. The two siblings looked at each other, reacted at how close they were and jumped apart trying to be casual. Justin started hugging the armrest, and Alex jumped to the other end with her legs awkwardly folded inward to each other.

"You know," Jerry beamed at his teenage children thinking he'd figured them out. "I'm so proud of you two. You haven't fought or argued or sniped about anything in over three days."

"Yeah, well," Alex looked up with a secret. "You could say that, well, Justin and I have found a way to exist with each other." She looked dreamily to her brother.

"You used two "wells" in that sentence." Jerry was suspicious. "What did you do?"

"Nothing!"

"Dad," Justin came round to his father. "You just don't get it." He grinned, moved close to his sister and put his arm around her waist. "We just realized that there is a lot more to life than fighting with each other."

"Yeah, after all…" Alex noticed where his hand had landed and pulled it off. "We are… brother and sister." They placed their arms around each other and clandestinely grinned in unison.

"I'm so glad to hear it." Jerry smiled himself. "Your mother will be so proud. I'll go tell her." He hastened out of the lair, but Max was a bit more skeptical. He looked his older siblings over and tried to figure them out. Something was up here, but he couldn't figure it out.

"Something's not right here." Their little brother told them. "I'm not sure what it is, but I'll be watching. Yes, I'll be watching." He held two fingers up before his face and then pointed them to his brother and sisters as a gesture of himself watching them. He backed away to head out, looked back and headed out following his father's footsteps to the kitchen. Back in the lair, Alex and Justin waited for him to depart and then a few minutes more.

"William…" Alex brushed her head back from her face. "You've got to be more careful. We could blow this!"

"Alex, everything is all right." William had removed his spell on Alex to see him as Justin ever since the first morning she realized he wasn't Justin. "I've got everything under control. You've got nothing to worry about." Alex was the only one who knew he wasn't really her brother, but Max was dangerously close to figuring it out as well.

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah," He looked at her and brushed her long hair from her eyes. "I got things under control." He paused beaming upon her. "You know… you're just so beautiful." Alex lit up with that compliment. William tilted her head up and kissed her; Alex closed her lips over his. Their hands embraced each other, their breaths joined as one as everything around them vanished from them. All they had was each other for the moment, and that was all they needed as they realized how much they loved each other.

"Alex, honey," Theresa walked in without warning. "Would you explain to me…" She stopped in a cold shock to see her son and daughter in a romantic embrace then jumping apart to her arrival. At first, her eyes refused to believe it, but the two of them jumped back from holding each other, looked to each other very guilty and struggling to respond. Theresa was shocked. She was beyond shocked; she was mortified. Her son… her daughter… together, like that?

"She had something in her eye!" William claimed.

"Yep, that's it!" Alex backed him up. "And he got it right out." She grinned a bit embarrassed. "Thanks again, Will… I mean, Justin."

"Jerry!" Her mouth hanging open, her eyes transfixed, Theresa screamed in shock.

"What?" Jerry came rushing back from the kitchen. "What is it? Are they fighting again?" He tried to be a dad. "I don't know what's wrong with you two?" He shook his hand angrily. "Why can't you…"

"Jerry…" Theresa turned to her husband. "They were kissing!"

"Kissing? Kissing?" Jerry reacted confused. "Is that all? I mean after all the fighting, they…" He finally got it. "They were kissing?" He looked at Alex and who he thought was his son in shock.

"What happened?" Max came a bit late. "Did I miss it? Did I miss it?"

"I had something in my eye." Alex spoke and tried to convince them.

"Mom, dad…" William Troy felt he could still possibly save this situation. "Look, there is a logical explanation for what you just saw. I mean…" He chuckled a bit. "Alex and I were talking, we're getting along…"

"Yeah…" Alex let him take this. "What he says…"

"We just happened to hug each other…" William still tried to be Justin Russo. "That's what mom saw." He claimed mugging a bit too sure of himself.

"On the lips?" Jerry asked his wife.

"On the lips!" Theresa testified as she waited for the truth.

"Ewwww…." Max reacted. "Justin, what were you thinking?"

"May lightning strike this room if I'm lying!" William announced and the entire room started shaking. Alex reached for William, and Theresa grabbed her husband. Max fell over as the room quaked and shook violently as if the whole structure was being ripped from its foundation. Furniture slid toward the opposite sides of the room, shelves collapsed and decorations tumbled to the floor. The ceiling was cracking, the floor itself swaying too and fro threatening to collapse. The back wall of the lair suddenly lay bare as the bricks started cracking apart upward and downward again, pushing and falling free to the floor, revealing space behind it and widening into an aperture large enough for an army to march through, but instead of the bank next door, it was the large foyer of Mason Troia in Upstate Maine. A powerful spell had linked the two unrelated spaces directly between Waverly Place and Collinwood, Maine, linking the two structures on the other-dimensional plane. It was almost as if the shop had been moved and built on to the front of the great mansion. When the rumbling and shaking stopped, Alex hesitantly peered up through the smoke and piles of dislodged brick, toppled furniture and strewn books and bric-a-brac. Terrified and awe-struck by that display of powerful magic, Jerry lifted his trembling wife back up to her feet and noticed three sisters standing beyond them where their wall once rested. Max sat under the table scared for his life and shielded from the debris.

"Hello…" Donna Louise Troy, the blonde, beautiful and shapely patroness of Maison Troia in Maine, casually stepped through the opening grinning harmlessly and pleasantly while holding her hand out to meet Jerry. "Nice to meet you…" She responded cordially. "Sorry about the wall, I'll fix it, but I'm just here to get my son back."

"You… you what…" Afraid and alarmed, Jerry had never experienced such a powerful display of magic. "Your son?"

"Mom, dad…" Justin hurried through jumping over the pile of brinks and around the moved furniture. He hugged his mother and father. "I'm home! I'm home! It is so good to be home! Yes!" Jumping up and down, he was ecstatic!

"Justin?" Theresa recognized him through her terror. "If that's you, then… who is that?" She looked over to where the mystical Justin disguise had slipped from William Troy. No longer resembling Justin, he appeared in his true form, the same guise Alex had seen him as since the beginning of this masquerade. Holding Alex close, he coughed a bit from the disturbed dust and patted Alex to the back as she choked on the dusty air. Looking back, he tried to disarm the situation by flashing his steely grin with a harmless chuckle.

"William Balder Troy…" Standing as an angry parent, Donna said it disapprovingly. "You are in so much trouble. I'm sending you to Camp Half Blood for this."

"No…." The young demigod groused.

"Excuse me…" Jerry came forward confused and perplexed. "Could someone explain what's going on here?"

"Allow me…" Justin spoke up glad to be home. "Dad, that guy replaced me with him, and replaced him with me. He had everyone believing we were each other, and the whole time, Alex knew the truth and didn't say a thing about it!"

"Alex!"

"Hey, hey, hey…" Alex spoke up as William pulled her close. "I had nothing to do with any of this! I'm totally innocent." She and William shared a look. "I'm in love. I finally found someone who gets me!" The two problem children posed grinning side by side.

"You placed a spell on me?" Donna looked at her only son. "On me? Your own mother!"

"It was an accident!" William started his defense. "I was desperate! I had to get away from them!" He pointed to his sisters eavesdropping from the second floor, their eight heads poking over one at a time over the upstairs banister to eavesdrop, only to be joined by Stella, Maddie, Kellie and Emily, his four younger sisters home from Camp Half Blood for the family reunion. They were possibly actually nieces considering they were actually younger clones of Gwen, Jessica, Sara and Alicia created by some very shoddy spell casting, but they acted the majority of the time as if they were his sisters.

"Justin, I'm sorry…" William turned to Justin, demigod to wizard. "But you don't know what I've been through being related to them. They've turned me into their little sister at least five times, transformed me into everything from pets to dolls, sent me to Africa and the North Pole, back in time, embarrassed me in public, eavesdropped on my phone calls… I don't get any privacy around them. They treat each other a heck of a lot better than they treat me! So, when I overheard you wish that Alex wasn't your sister…."

Donna reacted as if she was hearing this all for the first time. As she looked upward at her daughters, one by one each of their twelve heads pretended to get distracted and hide behind the banister except for Gwen who looked to her right and then right again to notice them hiding in shame.

"Back in time? Into their little sister, huh?" Alex perked to attention trying to get a pen to work and jot down that note. "Never mind, I'll remember it."

"Oh yeah," Justin faced back. "Well, you don't know Alex! She breaks into my room, steals my stuff, makes fun of me, breaks the rules and ignores everything I tell her. She's worse I tell you. Worse!"

"Well, I'd much rather live with your sister than with them!"

"With them? With them?" Justin really wanted to beat William up; it was taking all his will power not to do so. "William, I was with your sisters for only three days and believe me, underneath their sniping, fighting, arguing, teasing and mischief, there's actually some real love there. They really do care about you, but under Alex, there's just more… Alex!"

"Hey!" Alex did a double take. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Hold it!" Theresa raised his voice over this teenage drama. "I'm slowly starting to understand what's been going on here. Justin, you've been him at his house…" Justin nodded to confirm it. "And…" Theresa turned to William. "You've been here pretending to be my son and fooling around with my daughter?"

"That makes so much more sense…" Max was shaking his head in disbelief. "I was thinking Justin was replaced by aliens."

"With my daughter?" Jerry snapped to attention, wondered what the young demigod was doing with his daughter beyond his knowledge, placed his hands in a pose to strangle someone and started to reach ahead at William to do his job as a protective parent. Behind Donna, her sisters Paula and Cyndi were leaning on the sides of the opening broken through the two linked residences. Cyndi was short, cute and shapely, and Paula was just as shapely but a bit taller and brunette. There was something oddly familiar with her. Upon seeing her, Jerry paused, stopped and took another look at her.

"I'm sorry, but you look so familiar…" He mentioned to her.

"Yeah…" Paula adjusted her hair and cleared her throat. "I was married to your ancestor Vincent Russo in the Fifteenth Century. I had two sons there, and seven grandchildren…" She smiled over him and fixed his hair. "I was also your nanny."

"You're great grandma Paula!"

"We're related?" Alex freaked and sprang away from William to get closer to her mother. Realizing what she had been doing and with whom, she made a noise of intense revulsion and raced from the lair out to the shop on her way to the upstairs bathroom to get sick.

"Alex, wait…." Realizing what was happening, William tried to stop her. "Please… we're not that closely related! Please… Oh, keep running!" He surrendered her as his mother caught him and held him with her own certain amount of demigoddess enhanced strength. She pulled her baby boy close like she used to, turned him to face her and beamed lovingly to his face.

"Sweetheart…" She held him and glanced into his eyes. "I'm truly sorry I was not there when your sisters did all those mean things to you, but I can promise you - if you go to Camp Half Blood, they won't want to mess with anyone who can use a sword."

"But I don't want to go to Camp Half Blood…" He whined. "I'd much rather be a Russo."

"Wow…" Jerry responded. "I guess that makes us the typical American family." He stood between his wife and two sons.


	8. Chapter 8

8

Justin Russo woke this morning with a big grin. As he looked round his bedroom, he saw his shelves of science trophies, good merit badges and rows of journals in a row. His Captain Jim Bob Sherwood display was in its usual place on the top shelf, his old robot stood frozen and powerless near the window and his closet stood partially open, filled with his clothing and collectible science fiction clothes. It may not have been the ideal teenage boy's room, but it was his room. From the Star Girl movie poster with Hilary Duff as a costumed superhero to the fantasy pewter figurines, it was all his. He cracked his back with a grin, swung his legs out of his bed and stood in his white t-shirt and pajama pants. As he scratched his back, he started joyfully humming along the theme to "The Andy Griffith Show." Alex meanwhile raced ahead of him and grabbed up the bathroom for herself. The whole time, Justin started humming even louder. Alex got so confused she looked out of the bathroom with her toothbrush in her teeth, gave him a dirty look then vanished back into the bathroom. The whole time, Justin was enjoying being home again. He waited his turn for the bathroom, and came down to the sub shop twenty minutes later this summer morning clean and fresh in his own clothes and happy to be home.

"Good morning, mom…" His kissed his mother after descending the stairs from the loft to the sandwich shop. "Good morning, dad." He turned and patted his dad on the back. "Max, my buddy!" He hugged his brother and turned to appreciate Harper, his sister's best friend. "Harper…" He grinned to her and noticed his sister at the table with Harper helping to fill salt and pepper shakers. "Hello, Satan…" His voice turned from happy to sour.

Alex shot him a dirty look.

"Justin," Theresa came over and drew her son close. "I guess staying in Maine with all those female demigods made you appreciate your life here a lot more."

"Definitely, mom…" Justin sighed contentedly. "I mean, my life here may be difficult at times, but it is my life. I've got parents who love me, a brother's who's a bit strange…"

"Hey…" Max reacted. "Oh wait… yeah, I can accept that."

"A sister who pretended I didn't exist…."

"Actually," Alex filled another shaker. "It wasn't that hard."

"But it's my life!" Justin raised his hand to his chest in assured declaration of his existence. "And you know…" Justin didn't stop smiling. "Alex stole the bathroom out from under me again this morning, and I don't care."

"Come on, Justin…" Alex rose from her seat. "A huge mansion filled with extremely beautiful girls who never grow old?"

"Didn't care." Justin grinned. "But I am going to mss Gwen making me ice cream…"

"I should have known he wasn't you, Justin." Harper helped by filling napkin dispensers. "That other Justin said I had eyes as soulful as Argentina at sunrise." She gasped slowly as if she had fallen for him.

"Wait a minute…" Alex stopped and leaned down to her. "He was making passes at you while the two of us were…"

Jerry stopped and looked at his daughter.

"Doing our homework together…" She stretched the truth for his benefit.

"Alex…" Jerry grinned as an irritated father and placed his hand on her shoulder. "If I ever find out he was doing more than…. Doing homework with you…" He stopped, looked over to Theresa and back to Alex. He looked confused and annoyed. "Oh, I got nothing. What can I do against a demigod?" He set the last table and turned back for the kitchen but stopped just short of the doors. "What I can tell you…" He turned back toward Alex to continue his speech. "Is that those so-called feelings you had for him were probably fake. Like the Greek gods, some demigods have enormous charisma and abilities to stir emotions like you wouldn't believe."

Harper gasped out loud, drawing it out and long as if she was enjoying a memory. Alex looked at her slightly perturbed.

"He meant nothing to me – nothing at all!" Harper tried to convince herself.

"Well…" Alex stood from the table to toss her depleted soda in the trash. "Just to let you know, I am completely over William Troy. I mean, I don't care if he had big brown eyes, big shoulders and could take my breath away and make me feel like…" Her eyes fixated on a point outside the shop and she did the same low breathy gasp Harper had made.

"Okay, new rule…" Jerry was getting more upset by the moment. "No one is to make that…" He made the same breathy moan. "…sound."

Theresa suddenly made the noise.

"Mom!" Justin screeched. Alex and Harper's jaws dropped.

"What?" She responded embarrassed. "He said I was the best mom in the world!"

Everyone was still looking at her.

"He did the dishes for me every night and fixed my grandmother's antique clock." Theresa copped an attitude. "When was the last time any of you did something like that for me?"

"Yeah, well…" Jerry checked Alex's work to prepare the tables for opening the shop. "I'm positive we'll never see anyone from that family in the shop again." He turned with his hand on Justin's shoulder. "Justin, the lair is still a bit of a mess. I want you and your brother to straighten it and make sure we didn't lose anything when Mrs. Troy closed the portal."

"Right, dad…" Justin understood and nodded his head. "Come on, Max…"

"I didn't mean Max." Jerry turned back around. "He's going to a birthday party in thirty minutes. Get your other brother."

"Other brother?" Justin looked terrified.

"Hey, Justin…" As if on cue, William Balder Russo came out from the lair through the kitchen. "Can you help me back here? That guy left us a big mess!"

"What?" Justin couldn't believe it. He was back! "No! No-no-no-no-no-no! Dad, he's…"

"Justin," Lifting her head from chopping tomatoes for the sandwich area, Theresa responded frustratingly annoyed. "Get back there and help your brother clean up that mess!" She pointed the way upset.

"Justin," William placed a brotherly arm around his younger brother with a big grin after a brief glance to Alex. "You're not going to make me clean that room all by myself, are you?"

"But, Mom, Dad!" Justin was tugged away by William's arm around his neck. "Whoa!" He was taken through the swinging door and directly through the false cooler into the secret magic lair. The back wall was intact once more, but the furniture was still awry, the Russo Family Tapestry was on the floor and books, talismans, idols and mystical idolatry littered the askew furniture and furnishing. Justin jumped ahead and looked back to the young demigod who had cast his life asunder for the last few days. It was almost a first meeting. He looked something like a young Hugh Jackman in that bright blue t-shirt and tan khakis. His eyes weren't exactly brown, maybe hazel, and he was almost the same as Justin in size and stature, but he had a larger girth one would expect from a young man with gods in both his father and mother's families.

"What are you doing here?" Justin confronted him, but William just stood back and stared at him with arms folded in a complacent state. "Aren't you supposed to be at some summer camp called True Blood!"

"Half Blood…" William corrected him. "It's actually some school for demigods run by my father's old mentor. I'll just get there a little late…" He chuckled a bit. "Like a few weeks…" He looked back to Justin with a wry rascally grin.

"I can't believe this!" Justin was stressing out, but William was reacting aloof as if he was waiting for Justin to stop ranting. "You can't be here! How can my parents not know who you really are? Don't they know you're here?"

"No…" William stood grinning like a big rascal. "They think I'm your older brother." He paused a bit concerned. "You know, your parents are really susceptible to the power of suggestion."

"They are?" Justin wondered if that was because of Alex. "Just tell me one thing… why? Why are you back here?"

"Justin…" William responded abashedly insecure. "I'm in love with your sister. I've got to win her heart back. I just have to…" He paused truthfully emotional. "I've never met anyone who likes to pretend to be so irascible. She's… unpredictable, funny, smart, artistic…" He paused with an abashed grimace. "A great kisser."

"Too much information!" Justin screeched. "I don't need to know that!" He covered his ears with his hand.

"Justin…" William confided in him as if they were real brothers. "Give me a few days, a week or two? I mean… your sister's a lot nicer when I'm around." He leaned into him with his hand on Justin's shoulder. "You can't tell me you've never wanted an older brother… someone on your side for a change?"

"Three days." Justin's eyebrow went up suspiciously.

"Two weeks." William bartered.

"One week."

"I could just mess with your memories."

"Brother!" Justin beamed and hugged William and they laughed together. Theresa came strolling with two plastic glasses of lemonade on a tray for her two boys. The room was still in disarray and the overhead chandelier was hanging on its end.

"What are you boys doing?" She reprimanded them. "This room is not looking any cleaner. Come on!"

"Sorry, mom…" Justin and William chorused as they took the lemonade.

"Get to it." She took the tray and headed back out to run the shop. Jerry was fixing a subway club for a regular customer. As he chopped the onions further to order, his mind drifted back to his past of being with his wife and kids, but in those memories, it seemed there was only three kids looking at him: two boys and one girl. One boy who was responsible, a second that acted a bit slow at times and a daughter he didn't completely trust. His head turned up as certain events of his life concerning them seemed as if they should have ended another way.

"Theresa…" Jerry paused a bit confused. "Maybe I'm mistaken, but… don't we have three kids?"

"Four, Jerry!" Theresa reminded him. "You keep forgetting Max!"

"That's right…" Jerry chuckled at his forgetfulness. "I'm sorry, Max…"

"That's weird…" Max looked up from his video game. "I keep forgetting Alex!" He shook his head with a sigh and looked back to the game he was supposed to give as a birthday gift to his friend, Georgie Switzer, from school. Off to his right, several girls entered the sub shop looking around the place. The blonde leading them was in a striped black and white sweater and her brunette twin sister was in a black blouse with violet designer jeans. Their younger sisters were possibly about Alex's age. Harper looked over their choice of wardrobe and chuckled at their taste. Alex recognized some of it from her fashion catalogs. They filtered through the tables and chairs and came together at the other side of the dining area. Coming up to the counter, Tricia Troy lit up with a smile with her sisters Lisa, Maddie and Emily standing behind her en masse.

"Good morning, girls…" Jerry lit up to meet these teenaged beauties then responded curiously. "How can I help you?"

"Hi…" Tricia grinned romantically. "Can Justin come out to play?"

END


End file.
